A place for me to discuss recent book acquisitions, my academic and other writing, my reading of fiction and poetry, and my enjoyment of popular culture. About the name: John Dee (1527-1609) kept a considerable library at his home in Mortlake, Surrey on the outskirts of London.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Et in Arcadia Ego

"[Those words] conjure up the retrospective vision of an unsurpassable happiness, enjoyed in the past, unattainable ever after, yet enduringly alive in the memory."--Erwin Panofsky, "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegaic Tradition," in Meaning and the Visual Arts, (Doubleday ed., 1955), p. 296.

"Being a kid you have, like, 12 comics, and you read them to death; you have them memorized."--Brian Michael Bendis, in The Comics Journal #266, p. 98.

When I was a boy we had little money, but after relentlessly whining, I finally convinced my parents to give me 75 cents a week for candy and comic books. What passed for a local comic shop, though, was a broken down convenience store that I realize now was probably a front for some other (possibly nefarious) business. (This will become clearer below.)

Like Bendis, I was mainly (re-)reading a corpus of comics that I had already purchased or acquired through trades. Some of them I read until they fell apart. Here's a list:

The availability of comics at the convenience store was erratic and inconsistent, (as was my ability to afford runs of issues in sequence). The comics that I bought there were not even always in good shape. But you know, I really don't recall being disappointed or bothered by any of this at the time.

How could I have known that Spiderman's creative team was about to embark upon the follies of the clone saga, driving the franchise over a cliff? All I knew was that issue #150 was most excellent: clones of Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker? And one of the two Parkers dies? That was totally deep.

Poring over my 4 issues of the X-Men, I was ignorant of the whole Phoenix/Dark Phoenix story arc that picked up steam in the issues immediately following those that I owned. Though issue #99 was the cliff-hanger to end all cliff-hangers, I never knew what happened when the X-Men faced the X-Men; it wasn't until I was in college that I learned that Jean Grey actually died in issue #100. And the thing is, I didn't lose sleep over this. In fact, I must have read those four issues fifteen times, at least.

How things have changed! For instance, I've been scouring the Internets recently for issue #2 of Samurai: Heaven and Earth. Though I have the other four issues, I can't force myself to open any of them because of this lacunae in the series. Must. Acquire. Issue #2. First.

Has graduate school...teaching...writing academic articles and books...changed the way that I read and enjoy non-academic things? It seems so. When I do re-visit my corpus of comics, what I primarily derive from them is the historian's satisfaction that a few of them are important markers of the passing of the Silver Age. Nice, but no joy.

But that's OK, because the joy that I got from my ritualistic re-readings of my comics was a component of my adolescent mental world. (And I don't particularly want to revive or revisit that.) So, while I can't relive the joy, I can certainly recall it-- that's the essence of nostalgia.

I read my comics for entirely different reasons, now. And that's not a bad thing, either.